QZ.com Archives - 09 April 2013, Tuesday

If you’re an American who bought bitcoins at around $80 less than a month ago and sold them today for around $237 , congratulations! You may be on your way to accidentally committing tax fraud. That’s because you’ll run afoul of authorities if you don’t report what you made on bitcoin...

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With all the chatter lately about bitcoin’s surge in value , I figured it was time to try it out for myself. But rather than setting up a “mining” operation to create new bitcoins or investing US dollars, I realized I could transfer some money from one virtual currency into another. A...

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For all you bitcoin nerds predicting the surge of the online currency: Paul Volcker doesn’t care. In fact, it would seem that the eminent former chairman of the Federal Reserve—known for bringing US inflation under control in the early 1980s—doesn’t even know what bitcoin is. We asked...

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To produce bitcoins, processors must hum away solving mathematical problems . But mavros, another virtual currency, are simpler. They exist because Sergey Mavrodi, their creator, says they do. And while the recent spike in bitcoin value is the result of speculation on the open market,...

Bitcoin’s largest market crashes after wild price swing By Zachary M. Seward — April 3, 2013 Trading in bitcoin today (times in GMT) This is just a taste of what’s to come. The largest market for trading bitcoins, Tokyo-based startup Mt. Gox , went down for about an hour today, after ...

The psychology of bitcoin captured in one bizarre, catchy Cypriot anthem By Zachary M. Seward — March 29, 2013 An anonymous bitcoin user today released an anthem of sorts for the alternative currency that’s totally weird, kind of catchy, and slightly inspiring—in other words, a lot li...

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In Hong Kong and Singapore, it is not unusual to see couples pushing baby strollers that do not contain a baby, but rather a small dog. Sometimes the puppy prams are not wheeled by the dog owners, but by a Filipino or Indonesian domestic helper who has been hired just to look after th...

Digital currency bitcoin continues its remarkable and somewhat inexplicable run. It’s up 152% this month, and today the total value of all outstanding bitcoins—its market capitalization , if you will—topped $1 billion for the first time before settling back down. That’s quite a milest...

Bitcoin is out of control, soaring 57% this week By Zachary M. Seward — March 21, 2013 ​ Bitcoin, the alternative currency hailed either as the future of money or speculative nonsense, has soared 57% this week, continuing its puzzling climb in 2013. Analysts and people who help admini...

Joseph E. Stiglitz may be a brilliant economist, but familiar with Singapore he is not. This fact could not be more glaring than in his piece in the New York Times urging the United States to emulate the tiny city-state. His description paints Singapore as practically utopian: the ric...

Bitcoin suffered a flash crash overnight, falling 22% in the span of an hour before returning to the record-high levels at which the alternative currency has lately been trading. The cause was a software glitch . Bitcoin, which is operated as a collective with no central bank, recentl...

Bitcoin is trading at a record high By Zachary M. Seward — February 22, 2013 Bitcoin is back. The digital currency—which, unlike the cash in your wallet, is not issued by a central bank—has surged this year on bitcoin exchanges, hitting a new high today above $31 . Bitcoin hasn’t trad...

Singapore’s government might as well have dropped dynamite among the people when it recently addressed its aging workforce and low birth rate. Its solution: increase the population to approximately 6.9 million by 2030. Already groaning under the weight of 5.31 million people (up from ...

Got Bitcoin? Probably not. AP Photo / Vahid Salemi After decades of sanctions on Iranian trade , sanctions restricting the flow of money in and out of Iran have inflicted significant damage on the Iranian economy. That owes much to the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide International...

Nearly 80% of all US currency in circulation is denominated in $100 bills. (As of June 30 , 77%.) Seems somewhat strange doesn’t it? After all, we find remarkably few of our pockets jammed with those pesky C-notes . And it’s not just us. Economists acknowledge that at face value, the ...

Among the many worries Ben Bernanke listed in his speech at the New York Economic Club today is the continued danger of a meltdown in Europe: The elevated levels of stress in European economies and uncertainty about how the problems there will be resolved are adding to the risks that ...

China is building new geopolitical “facts on the ground” all over Asia, from deep-water ports in Sri Lanka to signals intelligence stations in Myanmar to coastal special economic zones in North Korea. Wang Menshu of the Chinese Academy of Engineering has drafted the plans for multiple...

China is building new geopolitical “facts on the ground” all over Asia, from deep-water ports in Sri Lanka to signals intelligence stations in Myanmar to coastal special economic zones in North Korea. Wang Menshu of the Chinese Academy of Engineering has drafted the plans for multiple...